There is a gap between the discipline of economics and the public it is supposedly about and for. This gap is reminiscent of the divide that led to movements for the public understanding of and public engagement with the natural sciences. It is a gap in knowledge, trust, and opinions, but most of all it is a gap in engagement. In this paper we ask: What do we need to think about ― and what do we need to do ― in order to bring economics and its public into closer dialogue? At stake is engaged, critical democracy. We turn to the fields of public understanding of science and science studies for our approach, finding three themes of particular relevance: understanding, expertise, and audience. We then discuss participatory budgeting (PB) as an example of fertile ground for engagement. We argue that with an economic-engagement focus, activities such as PB could be extended into the public-economics gap and provide avenues for an economic equivalent of participatory science: a form of participatory economics.
This paper unpacks what happened when members of the local community were invited to design and test a valuation tool – specifically a discrete choice experiment – to find a valuation for New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula. We argue that the assumptions that lie within a discrete choice experiment are revealed when we look closely at how community participants react to the discrete choice experiment survey they have helped design. These assumptions, usually unnoticed, include the necessity of making trade-offs; what actions are possible; the ‘reality’ of one’s preference structures; the need for abstraction; and the importance of big picture patterns. We also argue that how these assumptions are negotiated in practice depends on complex power relationships between researchers, participants, and the technology itself. While we might seek to ‘empower’ the community with knowledge of economic processes and valuation practices, this might not be the empowerment they seek. Participants find ways to be active negotiators in the face of valuation technologies.
Australia. This was accomplished by a changed pedagogy, one that moved from using the imagination for inciting empathy across time and space, to one using the experiences of the child to define the relevant social links between people. As a result children learning from the 1934 curriculum were taught to see a qualitatively different world than children using the 1952 curriculum.The cause of change can be identified by comparing Australia's role in global politics during the two decades. In the 1930s as the world suffered economic depression, Australia continued to rely on the British Empire for assistance and a sense of identity. The Great War was a recent memory, and as momentum gathered for the second instalment, the League of Nations took on a heightened significance for educators. These factors made learning a global outlook essential for Victorian school children.By the 1950s Australia had begun to distrust the British Empire, which, compared to the United States, had done so little to protect the country on the Pacific Front. The government realised that security and prosperity would have to be produced by the population of Australia itself, bolstered by the huge immigration programme of the post-war decades. By developing its industries Australia could become a powerful global player. To encourage people to believe that this was their priority the Australian government developed a programme of newly invigorated nationalism, making support of industrial capitalism and the acceptance of new migrants appear to be a duty.These global political factors clearly influenced the basic psychological and pedagogical frameworks of Victorian primary schooling. This can be illustrated by a direct change in the theoretical affiliations informing the two curricula. The 1934 curriculum was inspired by the British Hadow Report; 6 the 1952 curriculum by the American educational theorist Robert Hill Lane. This was a move from a uniquely British form of progressivism to a supposedly scientific pragmatism. It led to a dramatically different mode of pedagogy, one that by the 1950s stressed experience and dismissed imagination.But politics were involved in a much less direct way than simple institutional affiliation to the nation's new ally. These new techniques would not have been adopted had they not been deemed necessary to the political situation Australia found itself in. In the 1930s imagination was essential for teaching children to identify with the far-off British Isles and the history of the Empire. More, to ensure wars could not occur imagination was necessary for teaching a sense of cultural difference that supposed all children were such natural 'friends'. The nationalism of the 1950s needed a new form of pedagogy based on experience. Instead of believing in empathetic links between people built of their common humanity, children were to believe that there were links between all Australians based on their common life within economic and social structures. Their experience in the small world of family and community w...
thank you. And Oskar and Edgar, this book is for you. introduction The kids play a game each day at lunchtime; most of the class are involved in some way. They have gathered a bunch of sticks and made it into a little house, or sometimes it's a boat, or an animal's den. Each child has an animal name, one they have invented or been granted. As they play they take on roles-cooking, building a fireplace, adventuring along the fence line-that they do alone or with others. One girl is on the outs. They said she can play, but that she has to be wombat. Lumbering old wombat, and while she wants to play she doesn't want to be wombat. Nevertheless, she goes and gets pine needles from the other side of the playground to make a bed, and when she lays them in a soft, prickly pile at the back of the house, the others are interested. They lie down with her. This girl is a skilful user of imagination: turning pine needles into a bed, and her wombat self into a cosy, sleeping thing. By doing so, she also re-makes-for now at least-her relationships with her peers. Imagination in this game is obviously being done with materials (pine needles), words and labels (wombat), bodies (that adventure and lie down), and social relations (children first at odds and now lying together). The imagination children use here could not be separated from these material things; it could not stand alone as some pure imagination. These events are not just happening in someone's mind, and if they were, nothing in this girl's social world would change. The materiality of imagination can be obvious in play, and less obvious in a classroom lesson. But, I will argue, it is important that we work to see that in classrooms too, imagination is done. Key to this book is the understanding that imagination is not an abstract, ephemeral, mental object. Minds have a lot to do with imagination, of course. But so do bodies (that play, draw, speak, write, and touch) and so do other more mundane objects (pens and papers, huts and hoops, books and audiovisual materials). Imaginations are practised, they are done by embodied minds and clever bodies, with other bodies, and with stuff that is physically present, remembered, or fantasised. Imaginations might be habits: patterns that minds and bodies have done before. Or they might be newly improvised, blending people and materials in novel ways. Some imaginative practices might be praised by teachers and/or peers, while others might be ignored or hidden or told to stop. Each imaginative practice will make certain things possible and other things not possible. * Throughout this thesis, field notes are not claimed as verbatim records of what was said. In most cases words were written down minutes after I heard them. They do, however, record the sense of what was said.
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